


Do you want to build a snow elemental?

by juliasgoodusername (itsureismyusername)



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Adaine is a cinnamon roll and EVERYONE knows it, Adaine is ace even though it has no mention or relevance to this story, Aelwyn is a good person even if she doesn't know it, Angsty but kinda cute but mostly angst, Canon Compliant, Gen, Pre-Freshman Year, Sisters, Verbal Abuse, the Abernant parents can eat my whole ass just like Brennan can eat his dice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:14:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23292292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsureismyusername/pseuds/juliasgoodusername
Summary: A half-forgotten story of two sisters: how Aelwyn learns to abjure memories.[Yes it's inspired by Frozen. Yes you should read it anyway.]
Relationships: Adaine Abernant & Aelwen Abernant
Comments: 15
Kudos: 44





	Do you want to build a snow elemental?

Slice.

An arm falls to the ground.

"Hey! You're gonna pay for that!"

"Not at that speed, or were you threatening the garden snails?"

Aelwyn cackles with laughter at the way her sister's face scrunches up when she's losing.

A frigid beam of blue-white light shoots from Adaine's fingers, crackling into the minor dust elemental zipping around the yard. The dust elemental fails its saving throw, slowing as it takes 1d8 of cold damage. 

"Sister, you dirty cheat!" Aelwyn looks at her sister astonished. The ice elemental catches up and uses its remaining limbs for a slam attack.

"I bet you that ice would beat dust in a fight. You never said I couldn't help it out a little!" Adaine jeers toothily at her older sister. "That's how _real_ battles go, there’s always support from the party!"

Part of Aelwyn wants to toss that smart ass straight off the balcony from which they observe their home-summoned gladiator fight. But mostly, she's just impressed.

"Well well well, little Adaine, if we're going to play that way…" she snaps her fingers and targets a Fire Bolt directly at the ice elemental’s legs, promptly melting them.

"Icely Tisdale! No!!" Adaine squeaks in dismay. "Not fair, Aelwyn!"

"Oh I'm sorry, I thought cantrips were on the table," Aelwyn scoffs, "How exactly is that not fair?"

" _I_ used the same elemental type. _You_ exploited Icely's damage vulnerability!" Adaine retorts. 

"Oh please, if you know so much about elemental damage types you should use the same spell on mine!" Aelwyn offers. " _Honestly_ Adaine, when you go to Hudol next year they'll teach you never to let strategic knowledge go to waste."

Adaine rejects the generous tactical suggestion in favor of pouting. "Everyone already knows fire beats ice. There's no fun in finding out who's stronger with tricks like that."

With only an arm left, the ice elemental takes quite a beating, spraying frozen flakes into the garden their mother keeps for useful spell components.

"Fighting for fun? You're starting to sound like the grunts from that adventure-y school." Aelwyn mutters.

The ice elemental lashes out valiantly with a frost breath, but the dust elemental deals a critical hit. The fight is all but decided.

"Curse you, Dustin Timberlake!" Adaine hollers, just before the final blow.

Aelwyn hums in smug satisfaction, weighing her options for a scathing play on words. “There’s no need to have a _meltdown_ -” but before she can finish, the ice elemental’s death burst sends a blast of slashing ice shards around it. 

The dust elemental dodges, taking half damage, but the same cannot be said for the rope that tethers a nearby mistletoe trellis. The shard slices it cleanly. In a comical, Rube-Goldberg-esque fashion, the trellis tips into a cart of drying herbs, which rolls several feet before crashing into the fence, overturning and releasing its contents into their druidic neighbors’ yard. This startles a handful of giant centipedes up from the magically fertile soil, knocking as they skitter away into a spiraled arrangement of increasingly large quartz crystals. One after another they topple, making their way toward the center where three alder saplings surround a simple wicker altar, housing a nest with the single egg of some unknown (probably rare and/or dangerous) creature.

By the time Aelwyn registers the fate soon to befall the nest, the crystals already outweigh anything she could do with a Mage Hand, and the dust elemental is still slowed by the Ray of Frost. With a carefully used Minor Illusion, however, she could at least make it seem like they had nothing to do with it. Mrs. Ettlewasp’s raven was old and blind, and always got into trouble when she let it roam from the property at the end of their street. Mimicking the bird’s strangled caws and a flutter of wings would be convincing enough, as long as the centipedes didn’t feel like snitching.

She pulls fleece from her spell component pouch, but before she has the chance to perform the somatic component her sister is leaning over the rail, casting out Unseen Servant and commanding it to catch the toppling quartz just in time. 

Aelwyn is stunned for several seconds. Did she just get out-rolled in initiative by a _middle schooler?_ She looks at her dust elemental who shrugs sheepishly. 

“Clean up your mess!” she barks at it. It makes its way to join the Unseen Servant which has already made progress uprighting the crystals to their original formation.

With an impressive sleight of hand Aelwyn tucks the fleece into her pocket as if she had never grabbed it and does her best display of haughty disinterest. Adaine turns back with a blush of relief plain over her face. It’s so sickeningly charming how innocent she is, Aelwyn almost doesn’t notice the way her hands tremble. Another scarcely avoided panic attack, it seems.

“Really Adaine, you’d waste a spell slot that carelessly?” she jeers, leaning into her personal space. “What would the examiners at Hudol think of such sloppy resource management…” With one hand she waves haughtily at the invisible conjuration, but with the other she covers her sister’s shaking grip on the balcony. She feels the appendage still under her palm. An observer of the situation might even say she starts breathing slower, louder than normal. They might think the younger elf then matches her elder’s breathing, panic dissipating as swiftly as it arose. 

An observer would be an _idiot_ to say anything. Adaine is certainly smart enough not to.

Without making eye contact, Aelwyn continues lecturing. “You should be more careful of the role you play representing our family, you know. Not just as ambassadors, but our mother has merits to maintain as a professor. Why, one of the pillars of her curriculum is that a caster should always calculate the personal utility of her spell above all else. When you treat your magic like it has some kind of duty to any random neighbor, you _diminish its value_ -”

Adaine pulls her hand away sharply. This startles Aelwyn enough to make the mistake of meeting her sister’s gaze. A trap. She’s giving her sister _that look,_ the one she hates more than anything, the one that makes her feel so embarrassingly _known_.

“Doesn’t it ever bother you, that Mom and Dad have taught you to use magic like that?” she asks in a low voice.

“Like what? Economically-”

“-like a bad person.”

If only it were a wizard class spell, she might think her sister had cast Silence around them. She opens and closes her mouth, feeling like an utter fool. And then Adaine, her _baby sister,_ returns her hand to the rail, this time offering the same comforting gesture she received moments ago. Her hand is warm. Her eyes remain locked in, ever digging, ever exposing.

This is Adaine in her true nature. Socially awkward, even held back by her anxiety at times, but insightful beyond measure when it really came down to dealing with people. She was a prodigy without so much as a tutor. It was hard for Aelwyn to believe they were related, despite how perfectly identical to her own those piercing eyes were. 

The dust elemental completes its reassembly of the trellis, calling up to her in eager shouts of Auran. The spell is broken. Aelwyn recoils like a viper, hastily reconstructs the walls of her sarcastic persona, and looks down to the elemental to dismiss it with a flourish.

“Oh Adaine. You and your questions,” Aelwyn breathes.

That night at dinner, Angwyn plants his fork decisively in his pasta, hard enough to hear the silverware make contact with the plate. He doesn’t go so far as to scrape it against the china - he is the ambassador to Fallinel, the epitome of Elven grace, and therefore would never be so barbaric. But the near-gesture is well-known to the rest of the table, as a sign that he’s pissed. 

“Hmmmm…” he muses loudly, twirling the linguini in contemplation. “Such… puzzling news today… very strange… quite a mystery indeed…” As he drones, he eyes Adaine with scant effort for subtlety.

Adaine, true to usual patterns, takes the bait. “What. What are you on about, Dad?” 

“Oh Adaine, always so cutting,” their father chastises, “I was merely trying to enjoy this lovely pasta alla gricia, but I cannot stop thinking about the most curious thing I heard from the Bramblepelts as I was pulling in from work this evening…” he trails off, leaving the words to dangle before his daughter like a feather for a cat.

“Was it something about-”

“ _They_ said, that during their late-afternoon meditation, something startled their centipede garden, nearly _crushing_ their recently procured drake’s egg where it was incubating peacefully in an alignment ritual. Can you _imagine?_ ”

“That was-”

“And _then_ , out of the blue an Unseen Servant and a minor dust elemental, of all things, trapse into _their property_ and make themselves at home righting the mess. Just invited themselves in, without so much as a hello…”

Another pregnant pause. Aelwyn takes a bite of her pasta. Arianwen sips her wine.

“Well we-”

“Of course later they used Speak With Animals to ask the centipedes what all happened, and _they_ told a very interesting story about some elementals outright _brawling_ to the death _,_ and in _my_ yard, of all places!”

“It-”

“And I said, well Mr. and Mrs. Bramblepelt, that’s quite troubling! The only ones home at the time were my two lovely daughters. I trained them to be diplomats, not unlike myself, so if something like this happens again, I said I do hope they will be available to keep an eye on your garden. Yet I thought, how strange for elementals to show up on their own… And of course, I did not say so at the time, but I wondered, which of my daughters has the kind of _brutish_ interest in watching two conjurations attack each other like animals?”

“I summoned them,” says Aelwyn. Arianwen drops her fork. 

Angwyn shakes his head in disgust. “For shame, Adaine! That you would connive for your elder sister to take the blame-”

“Adaine had nothing to do with it. They were my spells. Go ahead and use divination, if you don’t believe me,” she continues. It is a reliable strategy she uses to never lie about 100% of the situation - she wasn’t _necessarily_ referring to the Unseen Servant in her statement, and the elementals were both her conjurations.

Angwyn narrows his eyes, and Arianwen regards her eldest in puzzlement, slightly paled. Even Adaine looks at her now, and she’s doing it _again_ , peering into her soul. Her own eyes display a cocktail of emotions, a blend that seems ready to overflow, threatening to spill onto Aelwyn.

“Aelwyn, darling, I’m not sure I understand,” her mother prompts.

Aelwyn shrugs, and blinks heavily, severing the connection once more. “Really?” she laughs. “I think it should be obvious. Adaine barely has grips on her _cantrips,_ and you seriously thought she might be responsible for a _level 4_ spell? And of course she could never convince me to make them fight for sport. I was simply testing their strengths, for my own research.” She concludes her explanation with a casual sip of water, followed by a toss of her hair. “Though the thought of what you suggest is at least good for a laugh. Little _Adaine_ casting conjurations in the yard… ha!”

Angwyn folds his hands, beaming. “Ah, of course! See that Adaine? Things can be cleared up so easily when you choose not to interrupt me…” 

Hours later, Aelwyn hears her parents conversing in the den, just before turning in for the night’s trancing. 

“Don’t forget dear, Hudol has standards. She cannot get by on nepotism alone.”

“I am all too aware, my darling. I hope for the best, and yet I am starting to think she will never catch up to her sister in talent.”

“Some things cannot be taught, even by such a gifted elf as you.”

She knows Adaine can hear them too. They know.

When all the lights have been magically snuffed, Aelwyn can think of nothing she’d like more than to get out of the house for the night. Surely she could find a frat party somewhere, or hell, even some random bloodrush jock to shack up with, as long as she doesn’t have to breathe the stuffy air of this house for one more second.

She is scrolling through contacts on her crystal, when she hears a voice in her head. A Message cantrip. Her sister’s.

 _Will you come talk to me?_ Followed moments later by a second Message. _Please._

Aelwyn pockets her phone and crosses the hallway with practiced stealth. She slips in the door, closing it behind her with a sigh.

“What do you want, Adaine?”

Adaine is sitting atop her covers, wearing a pair of frog-patterned pajamas - her favorite clothes. Aelwyn knows they are her favorite because they are the only clothes her sister owns that are not Hudol’s uniform or formal elven robes for Fallinel functions. She hugs a pillow to her chest, and does not look up to see her enter. She pats the empty space beside her on the bed.

“What is this, an invitation for a trance-over? Do I look like I’m 8 years old?”

“I heard it was something sisters do, sometimes.” Adaine’s voice is barely audible.

Without much thought as to what force compels her to move, Aelwyn finds herself sitting beside her sister as requested. Only then does she look up, revealing a pink, tear-streaked face. A hairline fracture blossoms on something somewhere deep within Aelwyn.

“Little sister… you really are such a mess, aren’t you? Our parents only say these things because they want the best for you,” she says, wavering between assurance and condescension.

“Oh, you mean what they were saying about me?” Adaine looks confused, smiles slightly. “It’s nothing they haven’t said before, or to my face, hundreds of times. I’m pretty much used to it.”

“So then what’s all this for?” She flicks her hand as if to waft her sister’s emotions away like a bad smell.

“I just,” Adaine sniffles, “Well, I’m not going to say thank you. I almost wanted to, but then you went and turned it to something rude, as usual. So I guess, um…” she snatches her sister's hand unexpectedly. Aelwyn has learned her lesson today, and turns her head away before those eyes can trap her.

Adaine takes a stuttered breath and continues. “I guess I just wanted to tell you that you don’t have to be alone all the time.”

Aelwyn’s eyes widen, but she doesn’t turn back. With darkvision she sees her sister’s room in shades of gray, but she thinks even in the daytime there isn’t much color to the way their parents decorate. Adaine makes it her own with the imperfections, the crookedly stacked books, the half-open drawers.

“I bet it’s hard, now that you’re in the higher levels of Hudol, where mom teaches. But I’ll always be here when you get home. You know I don’t really have other friends,” she laughs wetly. “And in the fall, if I get in, we’ll be in the same building again. Just in case you ever want to see me. Or even to be within Message range.”

Aelwyn has taken to reading the spines of the books on Adaine’s shelf. The ones from the library, or bought with her own meager allowance (Angwyn reduced her funds whenever he found her behavior to be unsatisfactory, which was most of the time), are obvious stand-outs. Adventures. Mysteries. Stories of heroes. She blinks back something in her eyes, something that blurs the titles.

“I love you, Aelwyn,” her sister whispers. “Are you okay?”

Aelwyn knows when she’s being set up. She is _not_ falling for it, for whatever look those eyes are boring into the back of her head. So instead, she squeezes her eyes shut, and hugs her baby sister with all her strength.

An observer of the situation, when threatened by Aelwyn at knifepoint, would say that Adaine starts sobbing first. Definitely not Aelwyn. In any case, the young wizards fall into sync with one another, blubbering and petting each other's hair and saying nothing and everything at once. 

Eventually, it shifts into one of the weirdest trances Aelwyn has ever had. And Aelwyn has _tried_ some _stuff_ with trancing. How else could she get away with spending so many nights out partying? For similar reasons, perhaps involving said stuff, she winds up feeling awake and refreshed hours before her sister, who remains tucked in her arms, eyes shut peacefully like some kind of sleeping human.

Their parents were right, and yet they couldn’t be more wrong. Adaine was never going to be her equal. She was the positive to her negative. The chill to her flame. The light to her shadow. 

The new day’s sun slowly creeps over the last surviving blooms of late spring, petals littering the ground like a carpet laid out for summer’s entrance. Merely weeks from now, Adaine would be taking the entrance exams for the upper school at Hudol. Unlike her parents, Aelwyn has absolutely no doubt that her sister is a talented wizard. She would pass with flying colors, as long as she had the right thing to keep her motivated.

_“We’ll be in the same building again. Just in case you ever want to see me.”_

Once she gets in, she imagines her sister will finally shine. Maybe then their mother would even notice her. And if she notices her, maybe she will loop her into those private tutoring sessions with her too. The ones where she teaches Aelwyn powerful and dangerous things, things about magic she wishes she had never heard. Things that eat her up inside because she can’t tell another soul. Thoughts pervasive enough that she would rather get trashed and fuck shit up than endure an evening in her own company.

_“You don’t have to be alone all the time.”_

Adaine can’t hear those things. She can’t bear those secrets, not when she dreams so desperately of being a hero. She’s too good. Good people don’t work for Kalvaxus. They don't plot kidnappings and the sinking of ships.

Yet Adaine still would. She _would_ do those things, because she loves her older sister.

As the color of dawn bleeds into the room, Aelwyn casts Mage Hand, pulling over an almost untouched book from her sister’s shelf: an arcane encyclopedia her mother had placed there. She turns to a chapter on mental abjurations. Memories.

Adaine is good, so good that she still loves her evil twisted sister. And Aelwyn loves her back. And because of that, and because she is so evil and twisted, she’s going to save Adaine the only way she can: by making her forget it.

**Author's Note:**

> Y'all I'm not even a big fan of Frozen, but fr fr... Sisters. Make. Me. Emotional. ESPECIALLY when sisters are close in age and have an adversarial dynamic forced on them by parents who have the same expectations for two very different people. And one gets coded as the fuck-up and the ‘successful’ one quietly suffers in her own way. When maybe the truth is all along they are destined to be each other’s greatest support? Maybe that hits close to home for me, fuck, I dunno…
> 
> BTW, I actually used the stats for dust and ice mephits, not elementals, when writing this, but Aelwyn always goes with elementals and she’s very talented so she can conjure anything she wants.
> 
> In conclusion, I may have gotten choked up from my own writing. Wash your hands and stay healthy everyone. I really do love you all.


End file.
